When satisfaction becomes obligation.

Consumer culture's achievement: not eliminating dissatisfaction, but making ordinary unhappiness feel like unbearable catastrophe, pathologizing the human condition itself as deficiency.

When satisfaction becomes obligation.

The analytic experience reveals a perverse shift: satisfaction has mutated from possibility into mandate. Contemporary subjects arrive in consultation not because they suffer too much, but because they cannot tolerate suffering at all. Every minor discomfort registers as crisis, every moment without pleasure as pathology. The culture promises total satisfaction while paradoxically rendering ordinary unhappiness unbearable: we have more access to pleasure than ever, yet less capacity to endure its inevitable absence.

This creates what clinicians encounter daily—subjects who experience the gap between advertisement and reality as personal failure. The problem isn't that satisfaction eludes them, but that anything less than constant euphoria feels catastrophic. Consumer culture doesn't fail to deliver happiness; it succeeds in making normal melancholy intolerable, transforming existential lack into emergency requiring immediate pharmaceutical or commercial intervention.

The cruelest aspect: this system feeds on its own failure. Each promise of total satisfaction raises expectations while lowering tolerance, creating subjects who need ever-increasing doses of novelty to maintain baseline contentment. The addict merely embodies this logic without pretense, choosing chemistry over the exhausting theater of perpetual consumer optimism.

Psychotherapy

1h

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